CFO Perspective: What I’m thinking about

When
Mike, our President & CEO, asked me recently what I was thinking about in
terms of the business, I let out a sigh. It was March 18, 2020 and we were
staring down a period of economic uncertainty.

The world was dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, the Canadian government had just announced that they’re releasing $82B in financial support to help Canadian businesses and workers get through uncertain economic times. The stock market had lost 20.3% of value in 30 days and we were expecting hundreds of thousands of workers in Canada alone to lose their livelihoods.

Internally
at Multiview, we had just transitioned to all staff working remotely and were
in the midst of making sure communications with our employees, clients and
partners were clear, concise and cautious. There were end-of-year activities to
be completed and start of year plans underway. There was a lot to think about.

In
hindsight, all those different thoughts really reflected three priorities:

Can
we survive this?

What
do we need to continue operating on the other side of this crisis?

Is
this an opportunity to thrive?

Survival

The
week before Mike asked me the question, we had already met to discuss our
company budgets for the coming year. Some clients were already starting to
practice social distancing, closing their offices and having employees work
from home. We thought about the broader implications of what might happen as
COVID-19 spread. Financially, the company had never been in a stronger position
to weather an economic storm. However, as CFOs and financial professionals,
we’re always thinking about risks. With so many factors to consider, we still
had to keep asking the basic question; can we get through this, and at what
cost? Could we survive?

For
every question that the team comes up with to test this, we have to be able to
answer it. It doesn’t need to be a perfect answer, but the answers have to be
reasonably accurate, timely, and they have to be consistent as we revisit them
in the days, weeks and months to come. I’m fortunate to have a fantastic
Controller who understands all of this and has access to the tools and
resources to be able to respond to these. We’re making sure to understand the
assumptions and how circumstances might change the responses. We are confident
that we will survive the immediate crisis in front of us, and have communicated
this to staff and clients. This is critical for us because we count on them as
much as they count on us.

As
a business, we cannot exist without a product to sell or service to deliver,
clients to purchase and staff to deliver the products or services. The
communication allows us to calm nerves and allow staff to focus on what they do
best – being client obsessed. For our clients, they are having the same
internal conversations on getting through the next few months and we need to
make sure they know they can rely on our continued support and service so that
they can focus on their business.

Operating once we’re through

Multiview
is a 30 year old company, has survived its share of economic storms, with every
intention of making it through at least the next 30 years. Retaining all of our
current staff and addressing the long list of vacancies and required
investments initially proposed by our budgets (pre-crisis) is a continuous
process. In a sector with high profile competitors, surviving the storm but
coming out weaker won’t allow us to execute our plans as intended. We are therefore
thinking beyond the immediate and need to ensure that we can at the very least
hold our position in the market, and even consider some semblance of growth.
This means being sensible about the necessary operating cost reductions
required to survive, and being strategic about the benefit from each dollar
spent. We try and do this with each of our everyday decisions, but there’s
nothing like a crisis to focus everyone’s attention on getting to the best
answers.

What
this means for us might include deploying existing staff into new roles so that
we can maintain levels of service in teams that need the help while retaining
our hard-earned product expertise from years of experience. In another example,
we will put in place the process to better coordinate staff travel to ensure
clients can still see us in person, but we can achieve this with fewer overall
trips and with less disruptions to client schedules. Discretionary travel will
be better managed, leading to immediate and continued cost savings, and freeing
up staff resourcing for critical projects. Having the tools to manage all of
this is critical, but more important is getting everyone to understand why we
were making these long-term choices in the face of immediate threats.

The reductions in costs are not going to be pleasant to communicate but by being open and transparent about ‘the why’ with our leaders, staff and teams, everyone can get behind them. More importantly, it opens the door for everyone to think about how they can help in their own way and with their ideas.

Could we thrive once this is done?

Knowing
that we can survive through this crisis and beyond, we’re asking ourselves if
we could thrive. Having answered the first two questions, extending our
thinking to thriving once we return to “normal” is next. If we can help our
clients operate through this crisis, could we help other companies prepare for
the next one (we don’t know when, but there always is another crisis). How
could we expand our services, broaden our marketing reach or make those
tremendous strides in the product that we normally couldn’t for all sorts of
reasons? With fewer sales expected and therefore more time for our sales and
marketing team, what could they do? With potentially fewer client
implementations, could we actually get the whole team to focus on making not
just incremental improvements, but major changes to processes and practices?
Could outside resources not normally available or within our financial reach
now be possible to engage? Acting upon these ideas requires reliable
information, and the courage to execute.

There are many more bad news days to come in the weeks and months ahead, I wish you the best as we all prepare ourselves for the tumultuous times ahead. Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel said “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

As a CFO, I want to make sure that Multiview isn’t just good, but great.

About Justin Winchiu:

Justin has worked at Multiview
as the Chief Financial Officer since 2017. Prior to this, he held progressive
finance roles in multiple Canadian headquartered international development
agencies. He has worked with local and international governments, boards of
directors and funding agencies in North America, Africa, Asia and South and
Central America.